1. Anthropologist: Joining another culture
Anthropology is the study of cultures. Unlike economics, which tends to focus on mathematical models, or psychology, which tends to perform a lot of rigorous experiments, anthropologists learn about cultures by living in them.
How do you join groups you don't belong to? Groups of different nationalities or languages? Different in political opinions, professions, hobbies, religions, or philosophies? How can you learn to live with these groups of people, get them to accept you, and allow you to live side by side with them?
2. Psychologist: Test your understanding of others
Psychology contains different tools of thinking in each of its assumptions about human nature, as well as in its methods of discovery. In the subject of psychology itself, there are countless tools from cognitive biases, attention models, morals, preferences, instincts, memory, and others. Dozens of books could be written on how to think better with these tools, and there are already many of them.
Interestingly, psychology is also a profession with its own set of tools for self-discovery. Like all scientists, this includes creating experiments, as you can control everything except the variable you want to study. However, unlike other scientists, the object of study for psychologists is humans, which means that they often cannot tell the subjects they test what they are trying to test.
3. Critic: Developing the work of others
Most critics go beyond just telling you which books to read and which movies you want to watch; They provide analysis, interpretation, and discussion that go beyond the original work.
The thinking tools used here are very important, even for people whose profession does not require them to analyse literature, for example. Its importance is manifested in many aspects. First, there is the ability to carefully examine creative works, and a much deeper experience than simply consuming the product superficially. Secondly, there is the ability to relate that knowledge to a set of other issues and ideas. This depends on creativity to be able to add more ideas to the original product.
4. The Philosopher: Predicting the consequences
Philosophers tend to have a similar style and toolkit to mathematicians, except when dealing with things based on imprecise words. As a result, there are many useful thinking tools for dealing with things that cannot be expressed in numbers.
One powerful tool is the ability to see the unanticipated consequences of scaling an idea to its limits, and this has two benefits. First, it can reveal flaws in the original idea, employing a "back-proof". Second, it can help you recognize the basis of your vague intuition about things, by exposing your thoughts to stronger hypothetical criticism, so you can see how they work.
5. The accountant: Monitoring ratios
Money is the basis of companies, and accounting is the work that monitors how it flows and checks to ensure that it is not interrupted. There are many useful thinking tools from accounting that allow diagnosing hidden problems, one of which is the idea of ratio analysis, as ratios are a fraction in which the numerator and denominator represent two different measurements within the company. For example, financial leverage is the ratio of debt to equity placed by the owners, when it is higher, the risk of default increases, while the price-to-earnings ratio indicates how much higher the cost of a company's stock is relative to its earnings.
These analyses from accounting are useful for other areas, for example, in the field of health. BMI is a type of ratio analysis, and in this case, it is your weight compared to the square of your height, but you can also track many other numbers and their ratios, such as the amount of work generated in each hour of work, as well as the errors in each line of code. So, organising data, tracking details, and watching for hidden patterns are accounting tools you can invest in outside of the field.
6. Politician: Anticipate the impression actions will leave
Politics offers its toolkit as well. The main difference between politics and commerce is that while both pursue a goal in the world, the former depends to a great extent on the impression of the electorate, whereas a company can do well and stay in business. A politician must perform admirably, and even then they may be fired due to a problem with public relations. Therefore, the thinking tools that politicians possess are not only related to anticipating the effect of certain actions, but also how this action will leave an impression on voters, allies, and enemies.
The thinking tools here mean that sometimes the right decision just isn't possible because other people won't see it that way, and you can't convince them. While that can be frustrating, it applies to many parts of reality even if we'd prefer it not to be.
7. Novelist: Weaving stories
For many people, stories are the linguistic embodiment of history, for we take what has already happened and tell it using some words so that others can imagine it themselves. Novelists understand better than anyone else that what actually happens is often not a good story, so the stories contain characters who have fixed characteristics that make their actions predictable. In real life, people are more affected by the context, and stories have beginnings and endings, but reality is a continuous stream of events without parts.
Unfortunately, people understand stories much more easily than reality, so you often need to weave the events you want to tell people in a way they can understand, and make things easier by identifying who was involved, when those things happened, and providing information to make it easier for the listener to follow through with the story.
While this applies to writing novels or making films, storytelling is part of everyone's life. We always face questions that require this, from "Why do you want to work in this job?" to "Where do you see yourself in five years?" These are all stories, and we have to understand their structures.
8. Actor: The best way to pretend is to be honest
A common thinking tool in acting is called method acting, and this technique involves trying to actually feel the feelings of the character you're playing, rather than just pretending to.
This may seem like a contradiction, as how can you feel something you know is fake? However, this depends on the power of imagination to conjure up situations to create empathy, as past situations that you have experienced can replace the situations that the character goes through, and then the feelings of fear, happiness, confidence, and emotion will seem real when you live them.
This also suggests a powerful thinking tool, which is to change your emotional state to get the results you want. For example, if you are feeling anxious, but you know you need to have confidence, you can visualise it as if you are performing a role, but don't fake it, rather feel it.
9. Plumber: Take the pieces apart to find out what the problem is
Craftsmen are under-appreciated for having unique problem-solving tools and strategies. Most academics would never consider a career in plumbing, carpentry, or electrical work, but these professions often earn more than those with a college degree, and for a good reason because they are hard and in-demand skills.
The essence of plumbing, like most other professions, is to take something apart to see what the problem is. To do that, you need a model of what you're working on otherwise a problem might occur, but you also need to take things apart to understand them. Many of us avoid taking things apart because we're afraid of getting our hands dirty, or we don't want to risk breaking something, so we don't try to understand how it works.
10. Hacker: Understanding the layers that make up everything
Hacking is one of the most misunderstood skills. TV shows portray it as a kind of computer magic, but in practice, hacking is mostly limited to understanding that there is often a more complex layer of instructions on top of which there is an easier layer to deal with.
The computer is designed in hierarchies. So, each of the levels is an abstraction and facilitation to the layer below in order to make it easier to understand, but sometimes this facilitation can allow you to do things at the lowest levels that would seem impossible to someone who only sees the highest level.
An example of this is memory torrent monetization. When most programs work at a higher level, they access the memory through restricted channels, and if you request something outside the memory, you will encounter an error message, but in practice all the memory is on one row. The sections of memory dedicated to different things are located next to each other, and if you can write to memory outside the restrictions imposed, you can make the computer do things that you naively thought were impossible. For example, in the game Mario, there is a bug that allows you to win when entering a strange series of instructions.
This thinking tool works not only with computers, but also in other areas of life. Remember everything you see is usually a facilitation of a deeper reality, and this may mean that you may have a glitch that you do not expect in the underlying system.
Final thoughts on thinking tools:
These are just summaries of a major tool from different professions, but in reality there are dozens, if not hundreds, of thinking tools for each field, and not only professions, but hobbies, topics, and general life skills also contain thinking tools.
The problem is that people often have a hard time recognizing a skill and extracting it from where it originates, and this is not an easy problem to solve, but if you can identify a pattern, you can begin to understand how you can apply it elsewhere.
Most of these tools will not work well in areas far from where they appear. A novelist trying to use storytelling to diagnose medical problems will be in deep trouble, but we often get too hung up on our favourite tools, and we don't think about which one to use. Creative solutions require divergent thinking, which makes us think of one tool when we need another.
In conclusion: Creative work requires a variety of thinking tools
A classic experiment shows the need for tools like this. If people were asked to use a box of nails to fix a candle to the wall, the solution was to use the box as a base because trying to use nails directly on the candle causes a mess. However, this is difficult because we think of the box as a container for tools, not as a tool in and of itself. Likewise, most of these tools may allow creative solutions to problems you may not have thought of, for example:
- If you were an entrepreneur, what would your company be like if you approached it as an artist, teacher, or novelist?
- If you are a programmer, how will your code improve if you use the tools of a salesperson or an accountant?
- If you were a journalist, what would change in your business if you acted as a scientist, or as an economist, or as a plumber?
Not every combination will be helpful, but many of them can get you started on the road to a solution.
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